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May 2020

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Why we need a clinical trial of hydroxycholoroquine, azithromycin, and zinc ASAP By Rob Williamson

By on May 17th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/why_we_need_a_clinical_trial_of_hydroxycholoroquine_azithromycin_and_zinc_asap.html

A preliminary study done by New York’s Grossman School of Medicine reports on the use of HCQ+AZT+Zinc versus HCQ+AZT alone in four New York Hospitals has issued its report. Here’s the key finding of the abstract.

Zinc sulfate increased the frequency of patients being discharged home, and decreased the need for ventilation, admission to the ICU, and mortality or transfer to hospice for patients who were never admitted to the ICU.  After adjusting for the time at which zinc sulfate was added to our protocol, an increased frequency of being discharged home (OR 1.53, 95% CI 1.12-2.09) reduction in mortality or transfer to hospice remained significant (OR 0.449, 95% CI 0.271-0.744).  Conclusion: This study provides the first in vivo evidence that zinc sulfate in combination with hydroxychloroquine may play a role in therapeutic management for COVID-19.

The “main finding of this study is that after adjusting for the timing of zinc therapy, we found that the addition of zinc sulfate to hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin was found to associate with a decrease in mortality or transition to hospice among patients who did not require ICU level of care, but this association was not significant in patients who were treated in the ICU.”

Here are the statistics:

Discharged home:

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ELECTIONS, POLITICS Comments turned off

John James, the Michigan GOP’s Rising Star

By on May 17th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/06/01/john-james-the-michigan-gops-rising-star/
From Army aviator to the U.S. Senate?

You can’t choose your crisis: As an Army chopper pilot in Iraq, John James said on May 7, “I didn’t get to pick which call I would take, whether I would take a troops-in-contact call or whether I would take a point-of-origin rocket-attack call. I had to figure out how to do both.” In an online interview with Rick Loughery of the Young Republicans National Federation, James called it good training for confronting the COVID-19 pandemic: “We have a dual obligation,” he said, to “flatten the COVID curve without flatlining our economy.”

As a GOP Senate candidate from Michigan, James refers to his military career at almost every opportunity. An op-ed he wrote in the Detroit News on May 5 carried this headline: “Leaders Should Learn These 3 Rules from West Point.” His campaign’s logo features an Apache attack helicopter in its background. “I don’t want to go to Washington,” he said on February 5, before the coronavirus forced him to suspend public appearances. “I want to go to the swamp about as much as I wanted to go to the desert.”

He really does want to go to Washington, of course—he’s running for the Senate for the second time in two years—but his audience of Livingston County Republicans that evening seemed to appreciate the expression of modesty.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Code and the Key By David Mamet *******

By on May 17th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/06/01/the-code-and-the-key/

Lessons from human nature about writing, politics, and Donald Trump

I  worked one summer as a kitchen boy in a Wisconsin summer camp. It was one of those jobs from which you fall down at night near too tired to sleep. A previous occupant of my bunk had left behind a copy of Atlas Shrugged. So I spent the summer, between work and sleep, reading the perfect companion for my teenage summer.

I don’t care for short stories. I prefer the heft of the doorstop book, reassuring me that I can immerse myself in the fantasy for a good long time. “Yes, yes,” I think. “Thank you. Take me. Anywhere but here . . . ”

My companion for the lockdown is The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet, written by David Kahn in 1967 and updated by him in 1996. One thousand pages so interesting that my mind will not reject them even though they are informative.

My new novel, not yet released, is Forty Years at Anstett, a fictional account of one man’s life at a New England prep school. In it, a young man returns from imprisonment in Japan during the Russo–Japanese War. The fellow applies for the job of instructor of languages. He has no academic credentials, but a very practical one: He was forced, in prison, to learn Japanese, Russian, Chinese, and, more important, how to learn languages. He challenges the Head (my protagonist) to point out the dullest lad in the school, to name a language, to leave the applicant alone with the boy for an afternoon, and then to assess his progress in the new tongue.

“Well,” the Head says, “Latin or Greek. I’d say Latin; it’s simpler as it shares our alphabet.” “No,” the applicant says, “it’s simpler to teach Greek. A new alphabet is a code. What twelve-year-old boy has ever been able to resist a code?”

Not I, certainly. It seems I’ve spent my professional life fashioning them and solving them, and have found the process commutative, which is to say, the study of one is the study of the other—it works in both directions.

Here’s what I mean. Raymond Chandler wrote, in his essay “The Simple Art of Murder” (1939), that it is near impossible to craft a good murder mystery, as it requires two otherwise unconnected skills: the ability to write beautifully and the ability to fashion a code.

He is near right in his observation. The two skills—while not mutually exclusive per se—are unlikely to be found fully developed in any practitioner, because to achieve excellence, he or she would have to devote all energy to one or the other. I know of no great contemporary instrumentalist who is also a great composer.

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, MEDIA Comments turned off

Our Nevermind Media By Kyle Smith

By on May 17th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/our-nevermind-media/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

The media shrug at their massive bungling of major stories.

How lovely it is to have a high-profile job in our major media institutions. Let’s say you completely, hideously muck up a huge story. Let’s say you spend three years wildly misleading the public. Let’s say that, at the outset of the worst public-health crisis in a century, you mock people for being afraid and tell them to go about life as usual. When you’re proven wrong, you get to tell the next chapter of the story anyway. And if you feel like saying, “No fair noticing we were wrong!” you know other members of the mainstream-media cartel will rush to support you.

Media observers are today noticing how strange it is for reporters to juxtapose panic about Florida, where the virus has done relatively little damage, with robust defense of New York, the coronavirus death capital of the Western world.

This week, after Politico Florida correspondent Marc Caputo noted that the long-predicted mass outbreak of coronavirus in his state still hasn’t happened, with three full months having passed since the first dire warnings about spring breakers partying on the beaches, Daily Beast Washington correspondent and CNN analyst Jackie Kucinich threw the yellow flag.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Unmasking? The Real Story Is When Flynn Was Not Masked in the First Place By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on May 17th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/michael-flynn-unmasking-real-story-is-when-he-was-not-masked-in-the-first-place/

Was his call with Kislyak recorded by a different agency than the FBI?

Despite Wednesday’s blockbuster news about the dozens of Obama-administration officials who “unmasked” then-incoming Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn, there remains a gaping hole in the story: Where is the record showing who unmasked Flynn in connection with his fateful conversation with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak?

There isn’t one.

There is no such evidence in the unmasking list that acting national intelligence director Richard Grenell provided to Senators Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R., Wis.). I suspect that’s because General Flynn’s identity was not “masked” in the first place. Instead, his December 29 call with Kislyak was likely intercepted under an intelligence program not subject to the masking rules, probably by the CIA or a friendly foreign spy service acting in a nod-and-wink arrangement with our intelligence community.

Intelligence Collection Under FISA
“Unmasking” is a term of art for revealing in classified reports the names of Americans who have been “incidentally” monitored by our intelligence agencies. Presumptively, the names of Americans should be concealed in these reports, which reflect the surveillance of foreign targets, primarily under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Broadly speaking, FISA governs two kinds of intelligence collection.

The first is “traditional” FISA — the targeted monitoring of a suspected clandestine operative of a foreign power. If the FBI shows the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) probable cause that a person inside the United States is acting as a foreign power’s agent, it may obtain a warrant to surveil that person. If the foreign power’s suspected agent communicates with Americans, the latter are incidentally intercepted even though they are not the targets of the surveillance.

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

New York’s Terrible Decisions on Wuhan Coronavirus Screwed the Rest of America Katie Pavlich

By on May 17th, 2020

https://outline.com/pw7wpn

The curve of Wuhan coronavirus cases across the country has flattened and cities are slowly coming out of stay-at-home orders. Businesses are opening back up and people are doing what they can to return to normalcy.

But the bad decisions made by politicians in the hardest-hit areas, specifically New York, should not go unnoticed as we start to pull away from the pandemic.

On March 2, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio was encouraging residents to continue their regular behavior. He even gave them ideas about what to do in crowded areas. The virus had been in the country since the end of January and rapidly spreading. Italy, a preview of what could come to the U.S. without proper preparation, was completely overrun, devastated and chaotic.

“Since I’m encouraging New Yorkers to go on with your lives + get out on the town despite Coronavirus, I thought I would offer some suggestions. Here’s the first: thru Thurs 3/5 go see ‘The Traitor’ @FilmLinc. If ‘The Wire’ was a true story + set in Italy, it would be this film,” he tweeted.

When things got serious just a week later, and New York City came under siege from the disease, de Blasio berated the federal government and President Trump for failing to send medical supplies or personal protective equipment. But it turned out, de Blasio didn’t order them.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL

By on May 17th, 2020

This week’s newsletter is full outsize  Israeli solutions to global problems.
–

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com 
 
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Detecting heart problems in coronavirus patients. Israel’s DiA Imaging Analysis (reported here previously) uses its AI image analysis of ultrasound scans to detect cardiac problems.  DiA has received a NIS 2.5 million grant from the Israel Innovation Authority to roll out its system to hospitals treating coronavirus patients.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3822032,00.html
 
Recovered. The 22-year-old critical coronavirus patient (see here) who woke from a 3-week coma in April has now begun rehabilitation at Sheba hospital.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/as-virus-sees-few-new-cases-a-once-critically-ill-22-year-old-recovers/
 
US approves Covid-19 imaging tech detection. The US FDA has allowed the use of previously cleared technology developed by Israel’s Aidoc Medical.to detect lung anomalies in CT-scans that are associated with coronavirus (Covid-19). It provides early detection of infected patients who show no coronavirus symptoms.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3820032,00.html
 
How MDA prevented an even larger disaster. (TY Stuart Palmer) Emergency service Magen David Adom and its 24,000 volunteers were critical to Israel’s pandemic strategy. Its trained volunteer call center handled over 100,000 calls a day and it minimized hospitalizations by testing 240,000 patients away from hospitals.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/how-israel-prevented-an-even-larger-covid-19-disaster-627486
 
New crisis ICU for Sheba hospital. (TY Hazel) Israel’s Sheba Medical Center has inaugurated a new intensive care unit with hundreds of beds to provide crisis response in future national emergencies. A significant donation for the unit was received from philanthropist Roman Abramovich, a long-time donor of Sheba Medical Center.
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/in-wake-of-corona-crisis-sheba-inaugurates-new-icu-627274
 
Good news for bone-marrow transplants. Israeli biotech Gamida Cell (see here) published positive results in its Phase 3, 50-center trial of NiCord (now called Omidubicel) that aims to increase the success of bone marrow transplants in blood cancer patients. The stem cells were established much quicker than alternatives.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/cell-therapy-firm-boosts-odds-for-blood-cancer-patients-as-key-trial-succeeds/
 
Surgeons save Arab with rod through his head. (TY IsraPundit) Kamel Abdel Rahman fell from the second floor of the apartment he is building. He landed on a metal rod that penetrated his head from left cheek to right ear. Surgeons at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital extracted the rod in two nail-biting operations.
https://www.jpost.com/health-science/medical-miracle-in-jerusalem-surgeries-save-man-with-rod-in-his-head-627525
 
2-year-old Palestinian Arab boy saved. Surgeons at Israel’s Save a Child’s Heart performed open heart surgery on two-year-old Hamza Ali Mohammed, who was born with life-threatening congenital heart disease. He has been hospitalized during the coronavirus pandemic but has now returned to his family in Ramallah.
https://unitedwithisrael.org/israeli-doctors-save-life-of-2-year-old-palestinian-miracle-boy-send-him-home/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzZiqtsQFio  
 
 

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

“Victimhood Culture” UK: Rape Victims Need Not Apply by Judith Bergman

By on May 16th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15930/victimhood-culture-uk-rape

“Almost 19,000 children have been sexually groomed in England in the past year, according to official figures that have prompted warnings of an ‘epidemic’. Campaigners say the true figure is far higher….” — The Independent, December 2019.

“The government’s repeated failure to acknowledge the role of racism and religious bigotry in grooming gang crime has led to inadequate investigation, protection and prosecution,” one survivor, who wanted to remain anonymous, told The Independent in December 2019.

In the era of “victimhood culture”, in which so many groups vie for the top spot of “most victimized”, being an actual victim of sexual abuse apparently has little currency among the social justice elites. Where, for example, are the feminists in all this? Where is the “me too” movement?

As the government is too squeamish publicly to debate the findings of the review, it is bound to be even more terrified of being seen as specifically targeting ethnic rape gangs to stop their crimes — yet that is what victims such as Ella are asking them to do. Not to mention that basic democratic principles of the public’s right to information are being completely disregarded.

In July 2018, Britain’s then Home Secretary Sajid Javid ordered a review into the characteristics of child sexual grooming gangs. “The scandal of child grooming gangs is one of the most shocking state failures that I can remember,” he said.

“I will not let cultural or political sensitivities get in the way of understanding the problem and doing something about it. It is a statement of fact… that most of the men in recent high profile gang convictions have had Pakistani heritage… I’ve instructed my officials to look into this unflinchingly.”

The review was long overdue, to say the least. In 2015, Prime Minister David Cameron told the BBC that the rape and sexual abuse of underage girls had been “on an industrial scale”: “Young girls… being abused over and over again on an industrial scale, being raped, being passed from one bunch of perpetrators to another bunch of perpetrators”. According to The Independent:

“The Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal saw gangs undertake the organised sexual abuse of children from the late 1980s until the 2010s and the failure of local authorities to act. Rotherham Council finally commissioned an independent inquiry led by Professor Alexis Jay, which found in August 2014 that some 1,400 children, most of them white girls, were abused by predominantly British-Pakistani men”.

Girls as young as 11 were raped by “large numbers of male perpetrators”.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Moral Busybodies Strike Again Have we learned nothing the past three years? By Julie Kelly

By on May 16th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/15/the-moral-busybodies-strike-again/

There’s a weird cognitive dissonance happening right now that is as revealing as it is alarming.

Just as we learn more details about all the ways Barack Obama and his henchmen weaponized powerful federal agencies to punish Donald Trump, Americans, oddly, are surrendering their own power to the same type of god-like government authorities under the guise of the common good.

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive,” C.S. Lewis wrote. “It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

The effort to stop coronavirus, much like the attempt to stop Donald Trump, has been presented by ardent defenders as their call to duty, a selfless act undertaken not to gratify their lust for power but to protect the public’s best interest.

There is no discernible difference between the high-minded hectoring of former FBI Director James Comey and that of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer—their decisions are above scrutiny because, as they often scold their lesser subjects, these decisions are made for your own good. (“Everything I’m doing is trying to save your life,” Whitmer just said in an interview.)

Lies, Lies, and More Lies

Let’s begin with what now is appropriately called Obamagate.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

THE COMING UPHEAVAL IN EDUCATION :LARRY SAND

By on May 16th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/15/the-coming-upheaval-in-education/

There is no way to sugarcoat it. The economic impact of COVID-19 will take its toll on education funding. The National Education Association is in full freak-out mode, “calling for an additional $175 billion to stabilize education funding—the $30.7 billion authorized thus far is not nearly enough.” The California Teachers Association echoes the $175 billion figure and adds that it should be part of a $1 trillion pay-out in the next CARES Act.

Referring to the 2008 recession when class sizes increased and teachers were laid off, United Teachers of Los Angeles President Alex Caputo-Pearl insists, “We cannot go back to that.”

We are currently the second-highest spending nation in the world, pouring more than $700 billion a year into education. Where do the unions think the additional billions of dollars are supposed to come from? Capital gains, withholding, corporate, and sales tax revenues are going to take a huge hit, and you can only print so much money before it becomes worthless. 

As such, education is going to have to make do with less. The question then becomes, how best to manage the cuts?

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